Schubart: Slip Sliding Away

(Host)
Commentator Bill Schubart writes about living in Vermont from his home
in Hinesburg, where he's been thinking about what life delivers us and
what we ourselves make of it. He notes that in many ways we are blessed
in the United States. So why then do we have such a sense of loss and
what might we do about it?

(Schubart) Life promises us nothing.
The quality of our lives is determined as much by arbitrary circumstance
as it is by our individual capacity for learning and enterprise. And if
we go by our standards here in America, the arbitrary circumstance for
most of the world is pretty rough.

Take those in Syria, or in
other countries desperate for survival, food and a form of government
that offers them a chance at modest prosperity. We already have those
things, yet our sense of well-being seems to be "slip-sliding away" as
Paul Simon sang in the 70s. We worry about what the future holds for us.

Our
high school graduates now have about the same chance of finding work as
those coming out of college with a debt load that will consume much of
their first decade of earnings. In Portland, Oregon where my daughter is
a college senior, graduates make deli sandwiches and the sex trade is
thriving.

Nationally, the job market is stagnant except in
forward-looking industries. Employers are either flooded with
applications for jobs they don't have or with job openings for which
they have no qualified applicants. Employment, like wealth, is
polarizing, with menial service jobs at one end and higher paying jobs
in the sciences, technology and innovation industries at the other. Even
the professions offer less opportunity for secure employment and
retirement savings.

A good part of the problem is that our schools continue to educate for a waning economy, not the emerging one.

Furthermore,
we ourselves have gotten lazy about education, less in our schools than
in our own homes. Education's failing grades begin in the home, not in
the school. We aren't engaged in our children's education, we don't hold
them accountable for their work. We are incurious ourselves. Helicopter
parents are not accountable parents. They look over the teacher's
shoulder rather than over the shoulders of their children. They curry
favor with their children whose affection they seem to need more than
their respect. But what our children think about our parenting is far
less important than how well we motivate and exemplify their love of
learning.

As much as we may need to reinvent our schools and
colleges for the future, we also need to remember that life is what we
make it, not what our government gives us.

Reviving our once
exemplary economy depends on repairing the damage we have done to the
culture of our once revered educational system. This is at the heart of
why things seem to be slip-sliding away. They are, and the fault is our
own, not government, regulators, a welfare state, or any other sinister
demon.

We must make education the number one topic in our homes
and also in our schools, not carry on about job creators as if they
were our only hope. We must regulate business fairly and strategically.
We must rebalance the interests of our citizens and business. We must
finally stop blaming everyone but ourselves.